We stopped developing web projects on Windows and switched to Linux (Ubuntu) Workstation. We are one with the Universe again. Seriously, run a VM on a reasona

We stopped developing web projects on Windows and switched to Linux (Ubuntu) Workstation. We are one with the Universe again. Seriously, run a VM on a reasonably powerful Windows machine and you can have both worlds and it all works very well. My favorite setup is a three monitor rig with Ubuntu on a VM running on my main monitor and other stuff running on the other monitors under the Windows host OS. There are a lot of advantages to doing this, including also running something like a Xen hypervisor and simulating an entire (small) data center infrastructure. If by packaging you mean deployment, yeah, it's a mess. Only in the sense that you can't just FTP you application to any old server like you do with PHP projects. It'd be nice if Python for the web "just worked" but it really isn't that difficult to get things setup (Nginx, Gunicorn, PostgreSQL, etc.). Also, there are a lot of reason not to want a canned PHP-type setup. We have a policy to never bring-up servers by hand. You capture your setup and configuration in Ansible scripts, document them well and things just work. Then use Selenium to confirm that all is well with a basic test application. Life is good.